Capote, Truman, 1924-1984. In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences. 1st Vintage International ed. New York : Vintage International, 1994, c1965.
Recreates the slaying of the Clutter family of Kansas, and the capture, trial, and execution of their murderers.

Krakauer, Jon. Into thin air : a personal account of the Mount Everest disaster. 1st Anchor Books ed. New York : Anchor Books, 1998.
The author relates his experience of climbing Mount Everest during its deadliest season and examines what it is about the mountain that makes people willingly subject themselves to such risk, hardship, and expense.

Atwood, Margaret Eleanor, 1939-. The handmaid's tale. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
Set in the near future, America has become a puritanical theocracy and Offred tells her story as a Handmaid under the new social order.

Bohjalian, Christopher A. Midwives. 1st Vintage Contemporaries ed. New York : Vintage Contemporaries, 1998, c1997.
Cut off from the hospital and rescue squad by an ice storm, midwife Sibyl Danforth makes the decision to perform a cesarean section on a patient she believes has died of a stroke during labor, but when her assistant tells police the mother was alive during the surgery, Sibyl and the entire community are drawn into a gripping trial.

Cunningham, Michael, 1952-. The hours. New York : Picador USA/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, [2002], c1998.
Two women with very different lives are joined together at a party for an ailing poet, and together they realize that even though their lives are different, they are tied together by a common bond.

Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee, 1956-. Sister of my heart. 1st Anchor Books ed. New York : Anchor Books, 2000, c1999.
Anju and Sudha, cousins in an upper-caste Calcutta family, grow up together, bonded by fate and heart, but their lives take opposite turns when they are urged into arranged marriages, until tragedy brings them back together again.

Dunn, Katherine. Geek love. 1st Vintage contemporaries ed. New York : Vintage Books, 2002, c1989.
Olympia, an albino hunchback dwarf, tells of a carnival family who breeds and trains their children for their freak show.

Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. New York : Picador, c2002.
Three generations of a Greek American family find themselves plagued by a mutant gene which causes bizarre side effects in the family's teenage girls.

Golden, Arthur, 1957-. Memoirs of a geisha : a novel. Vintage contemporaries ed. New York : Vintage Books, 1999, c1997.
Nitta Sayuri, a young Japanese woman who was taken from her home at the age of nine and sold into slavery as a geisha, discovers a rare opportunity for freedom when the outbreak of World War II forces an end to the only life she has ever known.

Gruen, Sara. Water for elephants : a novel. 1st pbk. ed. Chapel Hill, N.C. : Algonquin Books, 2007, c2006.
Ninety-year-old Jacob Jankowski finds himself haunted by memories of his past in the circus and the freaks, exotic animals, and other people he encountered as a performer.

Guterson, David. Snow falling on cedars. 1st ed. San Diego : Harcourt Brace, c1994.
When a newspaper journalist covers the trial of a Japanese American accused of murder, he must come to terms with his own past.

Haddon, Mark. The curious incident of the dog in the night-time. 1st Vintage Contemporaries ed. New York : Vintage Contemporaries, 2004, c2003.
Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.

Heinlein, Robert A. (Robert Anson), 1907-1988. Stranger in a strange land. Ace ed. New York : Ace Books, 1987, c1961.
After his arrival on Earth from his home on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith becomes the founder and pastor of a new religious sect.

Hosseini, Khaled. The kite runner. 1st Riverhead trade pbk. ed. New York : Riverhead Books, 2004, c2003.
Amir, haunted by his betrayal of Hassan, the son of his father's servant and a childhood friend, returns to Kabul as an adult after he learns Hassan has been killed, in an attempt to redeem himself by rescuing Hassan's son from a life of slavery to a Taliban official.

Hosseini, Khaled. A thousand splendid suns. New York : Riverhead Books, 2007.
A novel set against the three decades of Afghanistan's history shaped by Soviet occupation, civil war, and the Taliban, which tells the stories of two women, Mariam and Laila, who grow close despite their nineteen-year age difference and initial rivalry as they suffer at the hand of a common enemy: their abusive husband.

Irving, John, 1942-. A prayer for Owen Meany : a novel. 1st mass market ed. New York : Ballantine Books, 1990, c1989.
Tells the story of Owen Meany who believes he is God's instrument and his friendship with John Wheelwright; beginning at age eleven when Owen hits a foul ball that kills John's mother during a Little League game in 1953.

Kidd, Sue Monk. The secret life of bees. New York : Viking, 2002.
Fourteen-year-old Lily and her companion, Rosaleen, an African-American woman who has cared from Lily since her mother's death ten years earlier, flee their home after Rosaleen is victimized by racist police officers, and find asafe haven in Tiburon, South Carolina, at the home of three beekeeping sisters, May, June, and August.

Kostova, Elizabeth. The historian : a novel. 1st Back Bay pbk. ed. New York : Back Bay Books, 2006, c2005.
A young woman discovers an ancient book and a cache of old letters in her father's library, and thus begins her adventurous quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, a search that will span continents and generations, and a confrontation with the darkest powers of evil.

McCarthy, Cormac, 1933-. The road. 1st Vintage International ed. New York : Vintage International, c2006.
Traces the journey of a father and his son as they walk alone after a great fire has consumed the nation and left everything in ashes.

Morrison, Toni. The bluest eye. New York : Plume Book, 1994, c1970.
An eleven-year-old African-American girl in Ohio, in the early 1940s, prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be beautiful.

Nabokov, Vladīmir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977. Lolita. 2nd Vintage International ed. New York : Vintage Books, 1997, c1955.
Aging intellectual Humbert Humbert's obsession for twelve-year-old Dolores Haze, whom he nicknames Lolita, leads him to marry her mother just so he can be closer to her, but soon his love drives him to madness.

Oates, Joyce Carol, 1938-. We were the Mulvaneys. New York : Plume, [1997], c1996.
Tells of a seemingly ordinary, successful family who is nearly torn apart when tragedy strikes but finds a way to remain happy and loyal despite rumors, secrets and strife.

Pearl, Matthew. The Dante Club : a novel. 1st ed. New York : Random House, c2003.
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of an elite group of literary geniuses secretly working on America's first translation of "The Divine Comedy" in 1865, puts his career on the line when he teams up with outcast police officer Nicholas Rey in an attempt to find a killer who is patterning his crimes on descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's "Inferno.".

Picoult, Jodi, 1966-. My sister's keeper : a novel. 1st Washington Square Press trade pbk. ed. New York : Washington Square Press, 2005.
Thirteen-year-old Anna, conceived specifically to provide blood and bone marrow for her sister Kate who was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia at the age of two, decides to sue her parents for control of her body when her mother wants her to donate a kidney to Kate.

Picoult, Jodi, 1966-. Nineteen minutes : a novel. 1st Atria Books hardcover ed. New York : Atria Books, 2007.
The people of Sterling, New Hampshire, are forever changed after a shooting at the high school leaves ten people dead, and the judge presiding over the trial tries to remain unbiased, even though her daughter witnessed the events and was friends with the assailant.

Roy, Arundhati. The god of small things. 1st HarperPerennial ed. New York : HarperPerennial, 1998.
On a December day in 1969 twins Rahel and Estha, born to a wealthy family living in the province of Kerala, India, find their lives changed after the death of their English cousin who was visiting for the holidays.

Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York : Putnam's, c1989.
In 1949 four Chinese women began meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong. They called their gathering the Joy Luck Club. Forty years later they look back and remember.

Walker, Alice, 1944-. The color purple. New York : Pocket Books, [1985], c1982.
Tells the story of two sisters: Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a child-wife living in the South, in the medium of their letters to each other and in Celie's case, the desperate letters she begins, "Dear God.".